(light electronic music)
- Our final speaker
is the Director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency's
Chemical and Biological Technologies Department.
As was mentioned he is dual-hatted
as the director of the Joint Science and Technology Office
for Chemical and Biological Defense
within the Chemical and Biological Defense program.
He began serving at DTRA in 2002
when he was assigned as a mission commander
to the Chemical and Biological Division
On-Site Inspection Directorate.
He earned his PhD in organic chemistry
from the University of Virginia.
Please join me in welcoming Dr. Ron Hann.
(audience applauding)
- All right, let's see if the mic's working.
All right we're on now, good.
Hey everybody.
Welcome to Cincinnati.
Thank you for joining us at the 2019 Chem Bio Defense
Science and Technology Conference.
It's been two years since our last meeting
in Long Beach, California,
and even though our location has changed
the reason we are here has not.
You may recall at the last conference
we talked about our why, why are we here?
Well we are here for our warfighters,
it's all about our warfighters.
We are here to find new and innovative ways
to protect and safeguard
the men and women serving our country.
Today, nearly 1.4 million men and women serve on active duty
and another 850,000 serve in the National Guard or Reserves.
On any given day
more than 200,000 soldiers, sailors,
airmen, marines, and coast guardsmen
are deployed around the world, many in harm's way.
As many of you know I served on active duty
in the Army Chemical Corps
for 27 years until I retired in 2014.
During that time my peers and I faced nuclear,
biological, and chemical threats
in Europe, in the Middle East, in Asia.
While in uniform these kinds of threats
went from a training distractor
to an actual combat condition on the battlefield
in which we had to fight.
It never made us happy to know
that we had to put those bulky, hot, restrictive suits
and boots, gloves, protective masks on our face,
but we knew that our country depended on us to fight and win
our nation's battles no matter what the challenge.
The threats are no less serious today.
We've seen the use of chlorine and mustard gas
in Iraq and Syria,
we've supported outbreak operations in West Africa.
Thousands of legacy chemical munitions were found in Iraq
over the last decade,
buried or hidden from international inspection teams.
And we continue to identify emerging threats
as Brandi indicated, that do no conform
to international treaty standards
that would limit or contain the use of these threats
on future battlefields,
such as fourth generation nerve agents
that were used as an assassination tool
in Salisbury, England.
In the military's timeline or tradition,
one generation passes the fight to the next generation,
so I'd like to recognize those who currently serve
or have served in our armed forces.
If you are an active duty military member,
please stand and remain standing.
So if you're wearing a uniform, get up, yeah.
(audience applauding)
All right.
Those of you who are reservist or guardsmen,
please stand and remain standing, and if you're a veteran,
please stand and remain standing.
All right, great.
We have a big crowd here.
(audience applauding)
All right.
Thank you.
You can be seated now.
So join me in recognizing our warfighters,
thank you for the efforts and sacrifices you have made
for our nation.
We are passionate
about providing these men and women
the best possible chemical and biological protection devices
that we can devise.
The responsibility is great, and they are counting on us.
The DTRA CB team is focused
on safeguarding our warfighters and nation
from chemical and biological threats of today and tomorrow.
We cannot fail, we must succeed.
How do we do that?
Well it starts with an idea.
The proverbial light bulb that goes off in your head.
An idea,
the single most powerful thing humankind can create.
Want to go to the Moon?
The journey starts with an idea.
Want to cure cancer?
That too starts with an idea.
No matter what you strive to achieve
it all starts with an idea.
If you haven't heard Malcolm Gladwell's
"Revisionist History" podcast
about the Obscure Virus Club, you should listen to it.
In it Gladwell tells the story
of a small group of scientists who relentlessly pursued
the theory of retroviruses and reverse transcription.
At the time, in the '70s,
they were told their ideas lacked merit.
Everyone knew that DNA transcribed RNA and not vice versa.
Mainstream science was not ready to hear
that Mother Nature was throwing a curve ball.
At the time the epidemic was exploding.
In 1996 the UN estimated 23 million people
were infected worldwide and it was spreading rapidly.
Doctors had no way to treat it,
they didn't even have a way to test for it.
Basically the medical and science communities
were completely in the dark.
No one even knew was it was.
That is, until the Obscure Virus Club's ideas
on reverse transcription turned the tide.
Their ideas led to solutions that worked in response
to the world's HIV crisis, and that is the power of an idea.
However, it's not just the biggest ideas
that have immense power.
Even seemingly insignificant ideas can change the world.
This is my favorite example of that premise,
the Post-it note.
It's a little square of paper,
this one's three inches by three inches
with a bit of adhesive on the back.
This one weighs less than half a gram.
At first, it came in just one color, canary yellow,
and it was invented by accident.
It almost didn't make it to market.
But since then, Post-its have been used
for some pretty incredible life-changing things.
They have been used to propose marriages,
tell spouses about pregnancies,
launch scores of companies, and countless new products.
Even in this high tech era, the simple Post-it
is arguably the single most important tool of innovation.
Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO,
the company that brought you everything
from the computer mouse to the automatic defibrillator,
and the standup toothpaste tube,
calls the Post-It the perfect tool for innovation.
Likewise, Fast Company magazine hails the Post-it
as the tool for innovation ahead of scores of many
much more advanced technologies
like big data and artificial intelligence.
So why is the Post-it such a great tool for innovation?
Well, because it enables us to easily and efficiently
pass along ideas.
And that's it in a nut shell.
It's an IDD.
Or, idea delivery device.
And as many of you know in the DOD, we love our acronyms.
But back to the point.
It's those ideas that have the real power.
By facilitating the exchange of, the creation of, ideas
Post-its help us bring the power of an idea to life.
We could be talking about creating great art,
like the most monumental musical achievement
of the past century,
which as many of you know is Metallica's "One".
Or maybe, a new design of a rocket
that could take humankind to Mars.
Every great achievement,
in fact everything humankind has ever created,
has at its core an idea,
and someone that chose to chase that idea.
If anything, today's era of viral communications,
wildly rapid innovation, and explosive knowledge growth
only increase the inherent power
of each and every idea, good and bad.
Not only ago it could take years, even decades
for an idea to reach critical mass.
During the 1950s the average circulation
of the New York Times was just over 500,000.
So remember the Obscure Virus Club?
It took those scientists years to promote their ideas
because no journal, which is all there was at that time,
hard copy paper journals,
would accept their ideas for publication.
The race against HIV was almost lost
because these scientists had no way
to disseminate their research.
In 2019, this seems a bit hard to believe.
Things are very different today.
Earlier this year, a 17 year old's video of her cat
logged nearly seven million views in less than 24 hours.
Today's technology allows for a vast increase
in the reach and potency of ideas.
When today's innovators speak of power of an idea
or a technology, the watchword is disruption.
I define disruption in this case
as the capacity of a new idea or innovation
to fundamentally alter the landscape in which we live.
The Economist, a publication not known for hyperbole,
calls the theory of disruptive technology
the most influential idea of the early 21st century.
Today we see disruptive technologies all around us.
Did anyone take a taxi to the conference?
More likely, you took an Uber.
Uber has fundamentally altered
the realm of ground transportation.
Whether it's Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram,
social media has forever changed how we communicate
with friends and family.
Not only that, social media has changed the very nature
of information and communication.
Self-driving cars can potentially change
ground transportation.
Want to take a long trip?
Maybe not today, but some day
you'll be able to hop in your car,
eat a snack, read on an ebook, take a nap,
and wake up in California or wherever you're going.
All around the world, manufacturers and designers,
architects and planners,
are already working on a driverless world.
No more parking garages, only drop off zones.
Cars that are more like living rooms than vehicles.
Sector by sector, the status quo isn't evolving
it's being smashed by disruptive technologies.
Why am I focused on this here and now?
Because we are not immune.
It is only a matter of time
before we face a disruptive technology.
The disruptive power of ideas
is generally speaking a good thing,
but is also a double edged sword,
especially in our business.
One of the biggest challenges our warfighters will face
on future battlefields is surprise.
Those disruptive technologies we either did not anticipate
or could not keep technology parity
with our potential adversary.
Not long ago, only nation states had the capacity
to deploy a chemical or biological weapon system.
No more.
The items necessary to assemble a simple
chemical or biological weapon system
have become increasingly available
in the form of off-the-shelf technologies
and materials that can be purchased online
and delivered nearly anywhere in the world within two days.
Genetic engineering used to require
highly advanced expertise
and large amounts of expensive equipment and a lot of time.
CRISPR now enables a person
with a modest science background,
a little time and a bit of funding,
to undertake fairly advanced genetic engineering.
The capability to intentionally develop
a genetically engineered super weapon
is no longer just in the hands of nation states.
Almost any group with bad intent
and a modest scientific intellect
can seek to create a devastating superbug.
The potential for accident further complicates the issue.
So talk about a disruptive technology.
Imagine one event that could infect hundreds or thousands
or many more in a single outbreak.
How do we deal with these threats?
How do we counter the risk inherent in the democratization
of game-changing, potentially world-altering
truly disruptive technologies.
So those of you who were with us at the last
Chem Bio Science and Technology Conference
may recall I talked about out-sciencing our enemies,
about using the power of science
to safeguard our warfighters and national security
through technological superiority
by taking revolutionary big steps in science,
not evolutionary small steps.
What we at DTRA CB are now looking to achieve
has necessarily evolved with the times.
Today what we require is ideas
that we can out-science the enemy with disruptive power.
We want to disrupt the threat before we face it,
we want to change the game and how we fight.
We aren't just looking for a discreet technological fix
to counter a singular threat we are looking for ideas
that enable us to fundamentally disrupt the landscape
of chemical and biological threats.
Ideas that don't just take a weapon away from our enemies
but ideas that fully and fundamentally disrupt them
from ever wanting to even try to harm us.
Let's put the bad guys out of business.
That's the definition of disruption.
Allow me to offer a few of my own disruptive Post-it ideas.
We are working on these technologies now
to influence the course of future battles.
First, is wearable technologies.
At the last conference I introduced the idea
that it might be possible to predict if a warfighter
was about to get sick before he or she ever had symptoms.
I call this getting left of cough.
Working with our industry and academic partners
we can now monitor a person's physiometric data,
heart rate, EKG, temperature and so on,
to predict the onset of an illness 24 to 48 hours
in advance of symptoms, it's pretty incredible.
For the first time ever we have the potential
to get inside the therapeutic window
and beat many of the biothreat pathogens
that we are concerned about.
Another technology we're evaluating
is human organ-on-a-chip.
We can now take human dermal stem cells,
undifferentiate them,
guide them into becoming other types of cells,
heart, lung, liver, kidney, and so on.
Placing these micro organs on a microfluidic chip,
circulating a surrogate blood system,
and analyzing the data with a mass spectrometer
gives us unique insights
into multi organ and drug interactions.
This may ultimately allow us to completely eliminate
the use of animal testing
and dramatically bring down the cost
by eliminating drug candidates
before they ever make it to a phase one clinical trial.
Another exciting technology we're evaluating
is DNA-based vaccines.
Working with the National Institutes of Health
we're evaluating a vaccine candidate
to treat Venezuelan equine encephalitis
that has already completed a phase one clinical trial.
As, Ts, Cs, and Gs are relatively shelf-stable.
We could literally test the DNA vaccine in the States,
send the data over satellite
and recreate a vaccine on demand in an ambulance
at the outer edges of a battlefield.
Obviously we're working with the FDA
since this kind of talk makes them very nervous.
But this is just a start.
This is where you come in.
We need you to help us broaden the idea pool.
We will take an incremental progress to be sure,
a better protective mask, a better detector.
For example, last month we received a grant to fund
the first ever in-human clinical trials
for a vaccine for melioidosis,
a tropical infectious disease
that's a CDC Category B biothreat pathogen
This means that pathogen is moderately easy to spread,
has moderate morbidity rates and is difficult to treat.
But to the warfighter in the field
even being sick makes them operationally ineffective.
If they are sick they are out of the fight.
So yes, we will gladly take solid,
incremental progress like that,
but we really want to stretch the boundaries
and attain that truly disruptive something.
Think, imagine.
Imagine unfettered.
Dare to go outside the collective wisdom
because it's often wrong.
Einstein once said, "Anyone who has never made a mistake
"has never done anything new."
And the outcomes can be extraordinary.
This isn't just hot air, this isn't like a professor
offering class participation points that never materialize,
this is real.
Let me prove it with my own Obscure Virus Club-like example.
Eight years ago, at the Chem Bio S&T Conference
a group of researchers held a series of conversations
around using monoclonal antibodies
to counter the Ebola virus.
At the time, the field was opposed to immunotherapeutics
to Ebola and filovirus.
As a result, it seemed like no one would fund the research.
However, DTRA's medical technology division
thought it was worth a shot.
We funded the research,
which was undertaken by the US Army
Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease
and the Public Health Agency of Canada.
Sure, the funding helped,
but the dialogue alone created space or buy-in
to enable the research to be done.
And it turned out things were different than they seemed.
Not long afterwards, monoclonal antibody therapeutics
proved vital in responding to a variety of conditions
including cancer, rheumatoid arthritis,
multiple sclerosis, Crohn's disease,
and many other conditions.
DTRA's investment led to the first experimental
Ebola treatment, ZMapp,
which was adopted by the World Health Organization
to be actively used to counter
the extremely dangerous Ebola virus
during the West African outbreak in 2014 to 2016.
Results from this use case galvanized
the utility of monoclonal antibodies
and we are now looking at Ebola, Marburg, and plague
as possible future candidates for this technology.
So there it is,
the power of an idea.
From a conversation at a conference
to protecting warfighters in our nation.
An idea has the power
to literally change the world for good,
to safeguard our warfighters, our nation, and our allies.
To alter the course of history.
To that end, what will be the next disruptive technology
in chem-bio defense?
Will it be the application of big data?
Will it be the use of synthetic biology
to create universal therapies and vaccines
on demand without delay?
What will it be?
I challenge you to make these conversations happen.
Exchange your ideas, share your ideas.
Whether it's on a Post-it note or on the back of a napkin
I want you to talk about your ideas
with your peers and colleagues at this conference.
Form teams and respond to topics
in our broad agency announcements
or requests for proposals in the JPEO
or other transactional authority consortiums.
We've modified our business process this year
to bring more agility and flexibility to the process.
We're gonna put our money where our mouth is.
Three months from now, look for us to begin dropping topics
that we will be funding potentially as soon as October
or November next year.
But there's no reason to wait.
I'm hear, my team is here,
you're here, and the ideas are here.
Engage with the DTRA team today, here and now.
Find us at one of the sessions,
find us tonight over coffee or a beer.
Start the conversation now.
Bring us something truly disruptive,
ideas we've never seen before,
ideas on the edge of the imagination.
What is the next big truly disruptive idea?
Friends, colleagues,
disruption starts here.
(light electronic music)